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ALPHA team publishes laser measurement on antimatter atoms

December 21, 2016

(via UBC Science, TRIUMF) The ALPHA Collaboration, an international team of researchers from 15 institutions including UBC and TRIUMF, has released the first spectroscopic measurement of an atom of antimatter using lasers. This work represents a major step towards developing a very precise test of whether antimatter behaves differently than its normal matter anti-twin, thus opening up a promising new front to address the basic antimatter question: “if matter and antimatter were created equally during the Big Bang, where is all the antimatter?”

The UBC Team includes PHAS faculty members Walter Hardy, Takamasa Momose, and students Nathan Evetts and *Andrea Gutierrez. TRIUMF Research Scientist and spokesperson for the ALPHA-Canada collaboration Makoto Fujiwara, as well as SFU Researcher Mike Hayden, are both alumni of UBC Physics & Astronomy.

“Laser measurement on antimatter atoms has been a dream in the field for decades,” said Makoto Fujiwara. “We are thrilled and relieved that we finally achieved what we set out to do when we started up in 2004, not least because ALPHA stands for Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus!”

The experiment involves shining a laser beam on trapped antihydrogen atoms, which can absorb the light only at very specific frequencies. Measuring the distribution of these absorbed frequencies is called spectroscopy and it paints a unique fingerprint of the atom. Spectroscopic measurements are among the most precise in science, making them a perfect arena to test whether the structures of the antihydrogen and hydrogen atoms are identical.

Current theory predicts that antimatter and normal matter should have been created in equal amounts during the Big Bang, and should behave identically to each other, a consequence of so-called CPT symmetry. The former is a long-standing mystery since matter and antimatter annihilate upon contact, but our universe is composed purely of normal matter, suggesting that they are not exactly identical anti-twins. Any measureable difference between the two could indicate a violation of CPT symmetry and thus would have a profound impact on the mathematical underpinning of present theory.

The research was conducted at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. ALPHA employs a system of magnetic traps that allow antihydrogen atoms to be produced and stored long enough in a cryogenically cooled and vacuum-tight cylindrical chamber to be studied in detail. Laser beams of precise frequencies were shone through chamber windows onto the trapped antihydrogen to excite the so-called 1S-2S energy transition. The authors report that the antihydrogen spectrum was consistent with that of hydrogen to a relative precision of 2 parts in ten billion.